


O Tided Time

by skyshores



Category: The Last Unicorn (1982), The Last Unicorn - All Media Types, The Last Unicorn - Peter S. Beagle
Genre: Canonical Character Death, F/M, Gen, Misses Clause Challenge, Other, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-19
Updated: 2015-12-19
Packaged: 2018-05-07 16:16:37
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,604
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5463026
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/skyshores/pseuds/skyshores
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Molly and Schmendrick deliver Lír to his final destination. The unicorn visits him there.</p>
            </blockquote>





	O Tided Time

**Author's Note:**

  * For [PurpleProteinShake](https://archiveofourown.org/users/PurpleProteinShake/gifts).



> Set before, during, and after the rather devastating “Two Hearts”, which I think I had blocked out of my memory until I received this assignment. It has its own inconsistencies and non sequiturs within its canon (for instance, since when was Lir older than Schmendrick or Molly?), so I’ve tried to approximate them to the best of my ability. Also note that this story draws from the film as much as it does the novel, and assumes some freedom and license in the gaps either of the two leave. Hooray, ambiguity! Happy holidays, PurpleProteinShake, and thanks to everyone else choosing to come along on this ride!

The unicorn ached for the sea. In her dreams and days numberless waves haunted her in saltant-shape. Still she remembered them spume-maned and champing in pursuit of all shores forever, and because of this no sum of lilac wine could drown out that on which the rosemary thrived and this unicorn waned.

Soundly she had slept, with anodyne dreams only, in the crystalline spring that is enjoyed unto eternity by all unicorns, except she, for now she was full of thought and fear that stained all her restive hours with chimera-colour, with the fire of life, and the flowers of desire, and the light and lift of love she had once held in fingers offered to the ether and not the earth. When trees looked at her, they could no longer find in her eyes themselves amongst the sprawl of her endless vision, just as she descried a stranger in her own reflection upon even the smoothest pool. Verdure bloomed underfoot for her yet, but her heart was as the cold, far moon, and the colour of her hide pale as the snow that seemed to fall flash by flash inside the confines of her flesh. She was ancient, and now she knew it, so she wearied, holding her waterlogged head down as she tread paths through forgotten forests with all the languor of a summer evening.

The other thankless unicorns eluded her the way they did old wives or widows. Because the unicorn had known Lír she smelled, still, of man; and for it she bled so much sadness the others of her kind could not in their impatience and inexperience understand, hence they ran. And so she was alone yet again, and though she still called the lilac wood home, she did not burden it with a persistence of springs, and through the other seasons she trotted far and wide, going to those whom other unicorns would not, to try to forget her regret, whether she knew it or not.

Time who had been a stranger could never now be a friend. Even when it passed her by she was aware of where it was, for it became a place not to be passed through, though it remained around all the while. She sensed it now not in her own slow pulse, but in the dalliances of sparrows and the clouds scudding good-byes into unrepeatable shapes, small gifts returned by remembrance. But the unicorn’s natural aptitude for dithering often rendered her unable to sorrow or enjoy them.

One day, after she had just unfettered a downtrodden slave to the north, her ears pricked up at a lament directed straight at them, the voice that carried it at once far and near, echoing in such a way that was possible only by magic. Neither promising nor demurring to return, she took leave of the new freedwoman with a bow of her head, and galloped to the source. She was not far from him. She never was.

Awaiting her was a terrible scene out of a hanging one would only wish to depict one’s worst foes. In different ways, she had journeyed with all the people there, save two: the girl and the dog she clutched. Scullery maid and magician held each other, and griffin and champion had extended claw and sword respectively. Each had drawn blood or tears equally from the others. Of all those, the mortal the unicorn held gently in her undying heart.

Over her old love the haggard griffon bated against the makeshift jesses of his hands, fitted still with the vambrace he had worn and she had shed the time he brought her the singing head. His eyes were hungry and had the same dark gentleness she remembered, though their old colour had been dulled under a film of jade-grey. Everywhere else he had changed, but not in any way that is important to a unicorn. Sorrow and rue surfaced to the unicorn’s skin, never leaving it, and strapped her down from within like the ignorance of a common mare. She stood there under the trees sick and trembling with the memory of all that had happened between them. Yet when the griffin flew to the girl, the unicorn answered to her nature and charged without hesitation.

The griffin was no match. Nor was the shadow cast upon the dog her horn chased out. She stamped flat her paramour’s killer for good measure and nudged the dog reborn to teach it to walk again. She let the dead man stay dead this due time, despite Schmendrick’s spiel on why she should do otherwise. When these things were done she went to say her farewells.

“My friends,” said the unicorn to Molly and Schmendrick. She gave her face to Molly’s hands and let her fingers swirl around her cheeks the way they had when they had first met. The skin of Molly’s palms felt half like a cat’s tongue and half like a vestal prayer long beyond its potential to be granted. “I am sorry I could not come sooner, or do more.”

“Oh, but you _can_ ,” grumbled Schmendrick, barely able to keep in a shout.

“It is his time,” the unicorn explained, shaking her head and wondering if it was the human remnant in her that willed it, “as it will never be mine.”

“Don’t mind the dolt,” hmphfed Molly, who nudged Schmendrick to the side, “he still doesn’t know much about unicorns, try as he may. I’m awfully sorry for him.” She cupped the unicorn’s snout. “It’s been a long time, hasn’t it?”

“How long?” The unicorn stomped her forelegs in bewilderment. “I have not counted the days, for fear. I know not whether I would count them, if I could.” She looked to the corpses, as though she had no recollection of what had just come to pass, and wheezed. “I never learned while I was mortal how to keep the time.” The unicorn remembered the vast tide closing in and huffed again.

“Shhh, shh, my sweet,” said Molly Grue, “I never thought I’d heed that lifeless inebriate, but here we are, because of him. Think: that night under the castle, the right time—the right moment never came for the clock. The skeleton may have been an old lush, but he spoke the truth. We mere mortals have to swing to our own time. That way we begin and end the count anywhere, anywhen. Some days it’s the only comfort an old woman has. Consider that.”

“Yes,” promised the unicorn, but the all-nixing sweetness of her breath alone would justify any breach of the vow.

“Will you do one more thing for me, old friend? It’ll be my last request to you, if I can help it.”

The unicorn bowed her head and rested her horn on her shoulder and her snout on her breast, as if she were dubbing her a lady, though Molly thought, The touch of a unicorn is surely much better than that. “I shall try.”

Molly whispered, “Listen for the child. Go to her in times of need. It’s what His Maj—what Lír—would have asked.”

“It’s you she wants.” She touched Molly’s lined cheek. And then her horn pointed to Schmendrick, who was crossing his arms and biting his lips red. His irises were green as summer’s casts, each pupil a storm’s eye. Grave magic and heavier mortality swam and winked in his gaze. “You have Schmendrick the Magician with you, besides.”

“It can’t hurt to have a unicorn watching over, too.” Molly dared to press her lips against the unicorn’s jaw. “Seven years, seven years is a long time when you’re old as Molly Grue, and I don’t know if I can be there for little Sooz in that time, for all my contempt of it. Other than that, all I’ll say is please.” She gave her mane one last reverent stroke. “With a big, juicy cherry on top. That and godspeed. I know you’ll leave soon, you always do, damn you, because you know I’d forgive you for anything.”

“Molly.” Schmendrick put his hand on her shoulders gingerly. Then he turned to she who was once Amalthea, to tell her what he had been forgetting to tell her for so many years, but she was gone before he could.

Yet not far. The footsteps of unicorns are silent, and it was in this manner that this one walked with them, without being known, to listen to the talk of the two as it would be sans her presence, as an old friend who has returned from exile but is still too alien to burden another with the new unfamiliarity of their presence. But they did not talk, except to say good-bye to Sooz. After that, they were silent half the time, and singing dirges for a quarter, and for the rest struggling with emotion in strangled sounds they made to themselves. The unicorn waited with them for dusk, for the shadows that painted her green, then gold, to spread, and char her black in the night.

Soon the body began to fester. Where the griffin opened it the entrails boiled out, like bubbles over the brim of a haruspex’s cauldron, an oblation exchanged for a child’s safety and a hasbeen’s honour. Rot and ordure soured the sultry air. Whenever the horses slowed enough to turn into a target, the body became a king-sized bullseye for the fleet: wolves bayed; vultures circled above the corpse; flies buzzed down to make their nests in the innards; ants and roaches came marching up to the morsels. All the land cried out at the king’s demise. Schmendrick had squeezed the shape of the rein into his hand when Molly decided enough was enough.

“He deserves better, Schmendrick! The best, because he really was the best, and even if we can’t give him that, we should try,” she shrieked, and halted the horses. She lay her only cloak over the body to cover its horror a little. The blood stained the vert black. Next, she chucked pebbles at the scavengers. Her upper arms were very strong from scrubbing up and down a washboard, and aim true from chucking pans at would-be mutineers in the greenwood, so she shooed off a score for good with no effort at all. “He was a hero, a true hero, and here he is, living out the death of a common crook—”

“Isn’t that an Irish bull?” Schmendrick batted his eyelids greenly at her.

“Don’t start with me; you know what I mean! Think of something, _would_ you, you good-for-nothing loaf?”

Schmendrick raised one long hand. “What do you suggest? Shall I shroud him in an illusion like a creature of night in the blasted Midnight Carnival? Make his people see him as he was when—when _she_ was human still?” Schmendrick rubbed at his face so thoroughly it seemed the motions would smooth out his creases. They did not. “I’m not sure I remember what he looked like when he’d gone up against the bull. I can _see_ it so clearly, and I see it all the time, but I don’t know if I’m right anymore.”

“How could anyone remember it wrong?” croaked Molly. That soothed Schmendrick more than she had intended. “Besides, he deserves for his people to see him for what he looked like on his last day. How beautiful, how great…” Molly swatted flies, bearing the smell like a champion. “I’m tired, Schmendrick. We need to camp. Even you can’t work magic in your sleep. So if you don’t do it now there’ll be no Lír left by morning.” When he said nothing, she grumbled, “I never thought I’d say it, but I’d rather you parrot than mouse.” Still he moped in silence, whereupon Molly all but shouted, “Oh, you ought to do _something!_ It’s not like you can’t! _”_

He bunched up his brow and sighed labouredly. “I’m afraid I’d do him wrong, or what I don’t intend. She makes me remember what it’s like to be a pawn to power again.”

Molly Grue reached for Schmendrick the Magician’s hands, and held them fast in the knowledge that they were hers alone to command. If anyone could turn his cream to butter it was she. “I trust you,” she said, sure as an anchor. “Listen! You are Schmendrick the Magician, master of metamorphoses, maker of miracles, magnitudinous moron, _mine_. Do you hear me? And I trust you to do right and well more than I trust the sun to rise up tomorrow. Mayhap as much as I trust unicorns to exist and you to never stop chewing those damned turnips in bed.”

Schmendrick laughed. Love and awe and overwhelming grief poured into the vessel of his body, shook his shoulders and tickled his toes and made his knees knock together, until the power surged out of him into charged breath, emptying him to brimming, bailing him, that he could be full of loss. Then he closed his eyes and saw Lír. It might as well have been true that he did not want to resort to magic for fear of seeing Prince Lír as he worked it, and mourn anew that reckless and illimitable greed and zest and love inscribed into his handsomeness as he stood against the wildfire of the Bull’s red slow rage. But now, for the first time, Schmendrick saw King Lír in his second prime, broad and doughty and squinting against the bronze brightness of the griffin with its wings like a death shroud above him, Lír’s ending in his own vast valiant eyes and two hearts beating behind his breast and his tongue dangling out of his mouth as in yore. Schmendrick could not bear the power alone. Molly put her hands over his meagre face, which was her favourite one in the wide world, and he rested his hands on her wrists. She stroked calmness into him as he hummed away the hovering insects and then sang into being an endless lace of glitter that danced around and around and around the body until it was encased in an airtight glass coffin fit for the display of any dead beauty. The king inside, now clean and smiling, had been treated to the best work of some invisible embalmer, dizened head to toe with purpure velvets and encrusted panoply, and was serenely awaiting true love’s last kiss.

“There,” he mumbled, conjuring up a bonfire too with a snap of his long, knobbly fingers. Then his breathing heavied. He leaned against Molly to keep from falling over. Even the greatest wizard in the world got old, and tired, and doubtful, and ineffectual, with time. “That took at least twenty minutes too long, I reckon.”

The unicorn, who had watched all the while, could scarcely feel the fire’s warmth from afar. Her consolation was the better reach of Molly’s smell of homespun linen and the soap she liked to set into little moulds of unicorns and shells and stars before they touched and scented her skin. But where was Molly’s buttress, when she had to be everyone else’s, all the time? At last Molly, ever of her own special earthy beauty, looking in her immense compassion like a clay idol of grief there in that firelight, buckled under the yoke of endurance stacked so high, and cried into the angle of Schmendrick’s shoulder, a truss of her very own.

“Oh!” she wept, scrunching Schmendrick’s robe. “He looks—he looks wonderful. Magnificent, every bit the hero he was when he went up against the Bull and the ogres and the giants and the dragons and the griffin and all those miserable riddles and burning bridges and whatever else. As he should. Aye, thank you, for trusting me, for pulling through.”

“Dear heart, my love, Molly,” cooed Schmendrick. He pulled a white handkerchief from his sleeve to dry her tears, after which he folded it into a dove soft as spring that enveloped her in embraces of beaks and wings, followed by a myriad more of the magician’s own. Feathers fell and planted flowers in the ground. Fragrance ribboned around them. “How long have you been holding it in? For Sooz? _Her?_ Or for me?” Schmendrick himself had been stuffing his tears back inside his eyes once the unicorn had come. “Bottling up emotions isn’t good for your health, you know, unless you’re wanting to whip up a philtre, now that—”

“You old fool,” Molly coughed or laughed. Schmendrick was short of the robin he had given Sooz, but he still had jaybirds and canaries up his sleeves, and seeds that would bloom into fireworks, and flags he could transmogrify into cards painted with the queen of his heart. He readied them for Molly’s refreshment, for he knew her spirit remained as pure as that little girl’s, so she still had not grown immune to his goofs clandestinely sprinkled with a pinch of real starstuff. “Oh, Lír. Poor, poor Lír.” She slobbered into Schmendrick’s practiced fingers. “You asked me all those years ago if I’d ever been in a fairy tale. Don’t look at me like that, I still remember it, clear as the colour of your eyes. I think I really felt that I was, when we were on an adventure with a unicorn—by our love, a unicorn! But never after she left us.” She wrung her hands. “If there’s no end after death, then I hope he’s happy, wherever he is, if he’s anywhere at all. If not, then I guess he did rather well nestling himself into a unicorn’s heart.”

She opened her mouth to say something else, but Schmendrick shushed her with a frown and a kiss, like he so often used to when they were younger, but didn’t know or make the best of it. They fell asleep in his cloak to a sleepy morning Schmendrick spent conducting a band of peaches to croon a madrigal for his lady love while chomping turnips in the sleeping bag to Molly’s wild protestations, failing to hide her not-so-secret affection in her threats to abandon him for the greenwood if she ever found radish ends in her hair again, though at this Schmendrick only laughed and stroked her head and told her she was beautiful beyond any singing of it. Somehow the gesture still took her breath away, even after all those years.

The unicorn did not sleep, for dread of her dreams. All night she listened to the silence of the forest as it mourned the good king, and all morning she trudged up behind Schmendrick and Molly listening to it still, all the way to the castle. They went in it a little while, and came out with Molly trembling in Schmendrick’s arms. The unicorn could not get close enough to hear them, and would not be able to do so for a long time.

What does it mean, thought the unicorn, as she trailed them alongside a cavalcade of banner-bearers and buglers and weeping ladies with black veils over their faces. She did not recognise the radiant green path paved with moss on cobblestones that wound serpentine past apple-blossoms and pear-trees until they reached the sea roaring untowardly to her.

There the unicorn fought her instinct to buck, to rear, to flee. Yet when she saw her old companions braving that shore, and the body of Lír there regal even in death, she managed to muster up the same equanimity in herself. Seaspray pricked at her eyes as they placed him into a small boat with a carven unicorn on one end and a familiar woman at the other, filled it with sword and shield and a foxed pile of poems and a dress in lilac satin, whereupon they pushed the ship into the water. They needed no archer; Schmendrick simply waved his last good-bye and the little vessel, then a speck on the horizon, went up in flames. Molly stood motionless for a while before her shoulders started to shake, so Schmendrick put his arms around them, and gentled her till she was still. They endured the beach longer than anyone, and camped there for some nights. The unicorn listened with new patience to their conversations about all they wish they had said, to her and Lír and a great number of other people; what they loved best about the good king, and how hard it was to choose because he was a man of so many virtues; and the whys and wherefores of their destinies, and how they rued them; and what they would like to come next.

“I don’t understand,” said Molly. “Didn’t he build the castle so far off to be away from here?”

“Well, apparently this is what he told Lisene he wanted, before he left. Said he didn’t name his reasons.” Schmendrick shrugged shadows from his shoulders. The umquhile prestidigitator inside him hid his vast sorrow behind a front of indifference. “I can think of a few things, but most of all it was likely Lír’s way. He didn’t fain fear anything. He was a true hero, a real rock-hard brick, connoisseur of tradition, who knew the order of things, and I suppose the time and place of them, too. To the end he was our best paladin and eminent celebrant of happy endings. He’s earned his own, surely. And if he is out there he knows where he must go better than anyone alive.”

“So it is,” said Molly, then she mumbled something about how they should have gotten Schmendrick to orate the panegyric, which he didn’t hear, mercifully. Nothing but the sea touched their ears for a long time until Molly asked at last, “And what of the quick? He had no children. I fear for the future of the kingdom, even if I don’t mistrust Lisene. She seems like a good woman. And a little feisty, promisingly.” Molly leaned into Schmendrick. “I think we ought to put a hold on our adventures. For the winter at least. Or settle down for good if we feel like it.”

Schmendrick narrowed his foxfire eyes. “Frankly,” he said, smiling childlike and crookedly, “I can’t seem to recall why we embarked on them in the first—”

“To follow the unicorn,” Molly answered without hesitation. “Now we’ve found her, and lived out more stories than we can sing in the meanwhile. Ah, remember the afreet in the lamp, and the fairy in the bottle, and the time you stilled the storm, and summoned all the poor girl’s ancestors by accident, and got all the fountains in the kingdom to serve the elixir, oh, it goes on and on. That must have been a decade agone, now… My, we’ve gotten on in years faster than I thought.” With a flourish of a grin she totalled herself up: seasoned face, earthen eyes, rubedo heart. Schmendrick’s breath caught in his throat at the marvel of her. “Anyway, whether by hearth or helios, we deserve a dignified denouement too. We won’t get one by not tying up loose ends, eh?”

“We’ve gotten quite genre-savvy, haven’t we?” His eyes went crescent-shaped, shining like lagoons as he raised them skyward. His laughter seemed to last as long as his life had up till then. “In answer to your question, yes, in the literature there is some notoriety surrounding the unseemly cliffhanger; it is generally agreed that such an ending is something considerably less than the epitome of good form—”

Molly pinched his nose, as if he were a petulant child. “It’s only your pervasive stylistic influence, you highfaluting buffoon, you.” All the same, she drank up his laughter and felt her chest twinge with tenderness for him. “I stand by what I said. Whether you’re the stupidest or wisest man—quite in spite of yourself, might I mention—that I’ve ever met, for giving up what you gave up, I’ll never know.”

“Come, come,” chuckled Schmendrick, “the magic really did choose me. The decision to give it up in the first place was scarcely mine to make. I thought not of living or dying or becoming a true magician. I couldn’t say if I were thinking of anything at all. I’m not sure I was able to.” He looked up at the sky. “Besides, I hardly think it matters.”

“What do you mean?”

“I’m quite satisfied knowing I ever met you at all. Of all the careless mistakes and unfortunate accidents that have happened between the abracadabra of the creation of the cosmos to now, the ones we lived by and through led us to each other. If you hadn’t eloped with Cully, then you never would have met me, and I wouldn’t have met you if I had started out as a magician with any merit. And it just goes back and back and back, to our progenitors, to the stars, to the mysteries most elusive and ineffable ere that. Yet here we are. How many people can say that the same? Don’t you think it’s enough that we were here at all, and together, and tried?”

Molly crossed her arms and snorted. “Blood and thunder! I hate it when I agree with you. It’s downright unnerving.”

“Well, if it’s any comfort, I was only trying to say what Lír would. He did manage to develop the uncanniest ability to stop women from crying. He got so good at it that I think he managed to prevent the tears before they ever happened. And he didn’t even need to kill any monsters to do it…” When Schmendrick looked to Molly for comment, her silhouette was shivery, though it was getting too dark to see why. Schmendrick was no Lír. “Oh, Molly,” said he, ushering her into his cloak. “Come.”

She did. They sojourned at the king’s castle for the whole winter, during which Molly finally found the time to pick up weaving again. While she was finishing off the spiral of a horn, Schmendrick walked past with his hand on his chin, clicked his tongue, and blessed it with his powers of prescience. “Stupendous,” he remarked, “I’m sure it’ll will win first place at the fair. Third at worst, but you’d still get a pretty prize for that.” Indeed, when the tapestry was finished the year after, it would garner a blue ribbon, a new loom, and the adoration of a generation. Schmendrick kept it a secret that he had scried the victory in his crystal ball the night before, he was so on edge. However, Molly’s real masterpiece would hang in seven years at the most memorable birthday party in the history of revelry, with the greatest magician in the land as pyrotechnician, and a true unicorn present, all for a young woman whom Molly promised beauty begged to see.

Yet all that happened much later, after adventure after adventure. Back by the sea on the morrow of Lír’s death, the unicorn lingered longer still. Whilst she paced the beach back and forth, wondering why and what the deep whispered to her so, in the water narwhals jousted, flying fish cast rainbows that bridged whitecap to whitecap, and jellyfish illumed whalefall streets deep below. This continued on for who knows how many nights and days, with the unicorn sleeping seldom and understanding less, despite her endeavour. One day she woke to a silver tongue singing out the sound of spring rain, in a language known only to merfolk and their kin.

The unicorn faced the offing. Before it a mermaid perched on a reef, her scales each a vortex of iridescence, and her hair a waterfall of breathing coral. She had left her comb and mirror untouched by her waist, and was stringing together a pearl necklace. The mermaid has a mischievous look that imps have, which is in turn ever shadowed by the gossamer and elusive beauty and subsequent vanity that they share with the unicorn, though they are less aloof, and endlessly bubblier besides. Towards this one the unicorn trotted, her hooves printing diamonds in the sand as the waves crept up around her fetlocks.

“How do you do,” the unicorn asked, scratching the sand in greeting.

“Well. Thank you,” answered the mermaid. “And you?”

The unicorn whinnied. “I wonder! If I am going mad, to hear the sea call…”

“Not at all. The sea has all time to tell,” said the mermaid, with an air of mystery, for mermaids collect secrets as beachcombers do shells, and while there are many things a unicorn knows, there are more things they cannot explain that mermaids can, which they whisper to one another in the sea, folded up like a fan. “Listen.”

“To what?”

“The answer.”

“But I have not asked.”

“Then ask.”

“All right,” said the unicorn, but she was beginning to question if she’d have better luck wresting coherence from a butterfly, or a cat. “Diver, have you seen the Red Bull from your palaces of coral?”

“I know of no Red Bull,” said the mermaid, “but my home takes all that will have been or was. We have kingdoms of kingdoms buried here. Would you like to see Ys?” Her eyes shone like black pearls. “Atlantis? Alexandria? I shall take you if you wish.” Her webbed hands reached out. “You and I were sisters once, who served under the same powers. I can help you.”

The unicorn turned her small head up at the mermaid. “Some other time,” she said, gently. Later she made good on that promise, and experienced firsthand the splendour of these sunken cities. But for now: “I have someone I would meet first. He has gone into the sea, but is he there, still?”

“Ask again. You’re welcome,” said the mermaid, with a giggle and a salutary splatter, before she disappeared under the skin of the sea. The unicorn neared the water’s edge to see if she would surface once more, but the mermaid would not reveal herself until their next meeting. Alone again, the unicorn took a great breath and pricked up her ears. The tide tingled her hide and the clockwise breeze curled around her neck to escort her inward. She relented. It had been so in the dream.

She stole up to the flow, as a stray to an open hand. This sea touched the whole world, she knew, for she had coasted it all herself, globetrotted as the water in it had traversed up and down each tier of being, from ice to dew to cloud to rain. But this bight she had not touched since the Red Bull. The unicorn waded into the waves today too bright to be the colour of his eyes, so bright they blinded her. With the horn that had bested griffons and dragons both, and led ships through tempests to shore with its light, and lifted brands from a queen in exile, and pierced wintered persimmons to provide for wolf cubs, and driven the Red Bull back into the deep, she touched the crest that was the once frail breast of Lír, the cruellest and kindest regent of her heart there ever was or would be.

The waters parted, then closed, to receive her. Upon her dropped the weight of all the sea, of Lír: the ripe field of his hair in the sunlight as her shy laughter combed it, and smooth skin salty from sweat or spray or tears, and at last his great warmth spread beside or inside her new form stretched over the old one woven into the tapestry wherein they dreamed snarled, like memory to muscle to mind. First his grass-soft gaze, hot as fireflies’ graves, had thawed her fear in a moment of touch without touch, though she had known not how. Then she had not been afraid to reach and arrive, stay. Or had that too been a dream he had once asked to enter? As age had bleared his eyes brine blurred hers while she thought of the folds that had surged up in so many little waves of flesh that continued unto the horizon of his closed, still eyes, the waters of them forever frozen now in what was for her the blink of his life, which she held in her mouth like a kiss, to last as long as it would. If but Schmendrick knew she had let Lír be for that look of peace that had delivered him, then. Molly did. She always understood. To revive him would have been cruelty, though it was not lost on her that she had once said the immortal had no need of it or kindness.

She had thought she had known terror in Elli rattling and shantying behind her blood-iron bars while feeling her beauty depart her and ugliness dripping from her mane, but it had been no comparison to the time she had melded with another shape, whose tripled heartbeat knocked and pounded like a pendulum against the cage of her shrunken ribs, hard enough to crush bone to sand. There had been other differences she had not wanted to learn to love. But she had. She had loved how she had had space for him in that other form, and the memory of it cracked open hungry interstices between her old veins that she felt would come to turn her inward were she to let them. So she tamped her throneless bloodways with all the memory that would satisfy them. She had never imagined that she would wear her other skin, hoist up Amalthea as an aegis against the time she refused to let rob from her the artefacts of their heirless silver age nonetheless as precious to her as gold to a dragon’s hoard. Yet that is how she has never forgotten.

“Lír,” said the unicorn to the sea, her voice the first snow in the ruthless light of day, “do you remember me?”

And the sea shrilled back with such sound that it would crush the ears of any mortal. Alas, the unicorn was not mortal. She bore the waves listening.

“I am glad,” she laughed, for the first time since his second birth. “You have chosen well.” The unicorn frothed at her unbridled mouth in bliss. “The sea is never lonely, or silent.”

The tide carded her mane, her tail. She shivered, though she was not at all cold.

“I know why you have done this,” she whispered. “You thought I would not come back.”

Another torrent licked at her long throat and lapped her pale light in deeper blue. Salt closed and cleansed her wounds, but her joy did not cede to her pain. The seaborne unicorn pranced in midwater.

“I see,” she whickered. “I see.”

The water yawned, only to shut again over the unicorn’s tender withers. She tossed her head as the sea tosses, sending its surface into its depths.

“Do you do battle with the Red Bull here?” she teased; if this were a dream, then let the fire be no more than ash in the abyss, destroyed by the deep if not by herself, though she wished it might not be so, that she herself would know what it might be like to be one with the sea. Oaths absconded echoed inside the unicorn, and she remembered with an ache how the Lady Amalthea would have gone freely into the sea for Lír, merely to be near him. Would she do the same now, she wondered.

Knells sounded an infinity of fathoms down. Eddies dawned and died under her hooves. In the time between they sluiced through the split of each, and were there nerves there, she would have felt as though she had fingers to interlace again.

“You wished for me to forget,” she accused her love, “but that I simply won’t do. Not even for you.”

The sea chucked breakers at her and she arched her limber neck in wonder.

Then she said, “Yes.”

Thereupon brine flooded into all her bracks. The unicorn reared rampant, enraptured, dove for the depths, and attempted escape from her immortal shackles, if for a little while or forever. Her breath flew to the foam. She shone and spilled and splintered into all the spangles that form a moonglade. Sea-white cream rose with her same colour to the crest. Then sea and unicorn broke, wave on wave, shadow on white.

The unicorn continued to wrestle with the sea until day dimmed to owl-light over the shore where only bats dare fly overhead, whispering, “Sotosay, sotosay.”

It was then that she said aloud, “Ah, I must leave this, I must, even if I really could go with you to the ends of the earth. I know not how everything smells, tastes, and is not. I know how you do and are, though. What could I ever search for in the world, except that again?”

She must leave before she found the answer. But the answer found her soon enough. As the mermaids sung a lullaby for their sister long lost, the sea bore her back to shore and blanketed her in the balmy ebb of summer, her body layered wave by wave and step by step in the runny, relentless stairwell of memory. In her dream all the sky was over or within her, and nothing was in it but clouds that were bunches of lilac blooms and rosemary bowers dripping saline and scent. Through the nimbi she cantered up turrets of vines; past the back door, where trees sang in tongues and cast shade dense as thundereggs; over and under abutments of thick hair the colour of salt; to the spluttering, stinging, glittering kisses of the white swell, blood-warm and soft as new life, lighting her as though through a prism. At last she could weep at her own impossible doing so. When she woke it was as it was in her dream, the whole world the colour and sound of the inside of a shell, rolled up in the whorl of her sensorium, empty but for the fullness of the knowing of it. Then she understood: she was Haggard in the forest that spring morning; Schmendrick at the stature of his powers; Molly uncovering the legend of herself; Lír utterly lost in the greenwood of her swishing company; and she as she was when she believed she was the essence of beauty just as much as she was she after she knew that it was a lie and what it meant to die. This is all for them, she thought, This ancient novelty, and was herself again. The unicorn picked herself up in the manner of a newborn and staggered onward.

In the lark-light two rabbits washed their faces with dewfall from the leaf of a fig. One of them saw the glistening unicorn, sea-white and wet with brine, and scrubbed harder. The other was suddenly struck with the need for speech, the chance to say, “Lo and behold, beauty breathes, it walks. Nay— _dances_!” and in afterthought, “Beware being trodden underfoot by she who hoofs without motion.” Rabbits were mute, then, except for their screams, and their mating honk, which may have been for the better, since the scream was the pith of its argument, and no rabbit has ever performed love poetry faster than they have need for it. Perhaps for worse, the breath of the unicorn thus rocked the cradle of the Lapine language. But that is another story for another time, when rabbits are fables in tomes penned by men, seas are twice reborn in the spring tides of women’s tears, and unicorns roam hinterlands between shimmers of storied dreams.


End file.
